I come from a a generous stock of urbanity, people without a people, without roots and without attachment. We were born and raised in cities, and if some exceptional ancestor came out of a small population, they did not transmit either memory or homesickness of that. I have no rural life experience, for not doing, I have not even done camping, I am less of the mountain than a traffic light. That is why the towns attract me, They are the exotic, the unknown, the mysterious.
The first town that I am aware of having visited was Navaconcejo, in Cáceres. Everything stuck with me: the wool mattress, the barn, the smells and noises of the animals, the wooden gate, the hallway, the drying peppers, the crackling of the fire & mldr; For this reason, when a few months ago they invited me to participate in a conference in Soria in which people would be discussed, I accepted without hesitation.
Dragged by that fascination, I work on ‘Tierra Baja’, a feature film script set in what they call empty Spain, specifically in Bajo Aragón, Teruel, and I have also set my latest novel, ‘El cielo profund’ there. I got to know those places through Buñuel, who made such good propaganda for his town, Calanda, where today the Buñuel Center is housed and I have recently returned from the hand of the director, Miguel Santesmases. With the cinema the world is known.
I was preparing my intervention in Presura 2021, the National Fair for the repopulation of rural Spain (it is the fifth edition, each year with more exhibitors, more activities and better results) and I realized that, in the native audiovisual, perhaps by inertia, perhaps by economic reasons, the presence of the rural is infrequent, unless it is to tell some gruesome story of Puerto Urraco style crimes or of bygone times to the ‘Infinite Trench’. I remembered that, in recent years, it has been above all young female directors who have told us modern peoples: ‘Brave flash’, ‘The sky rotates’,’ Summer 1993 ‘,’ Black eyes’, ‘My dear brotherhood’, ‘ Innocence ‘& mldr; Women we move well in system margins, and the field, like us, is in that narrative periphery where we can organize ourselves with our own rules.
In other European countries, on the other hand, particularly in the french cinemaVery diverse contemporary stories are located in the rural environment. Possibly it is because in France the countryside is much more densely populated, it is a strong and decisive economic sector, to which the city does not turn its back. It also happens that there the countryside, the towns, are not discredited, nor do they have the bad press that here makes us believe that in a town lives the one who has no choice. Luckily, the pandemic has shown many that living in a town, away from crowds, is the closest thing to luxury, but fiction needs to tell better and normalize rural life.
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When it was my turn to intervene, however, the conversation took very different directions since I was in dialogue with Luis Calderon, Mayor of Nava walls, Palencia, great conversationalist full of good ideas. As is a natural tendency in me, I felt guilty in a preventive way and started my speech talking about stereotypes and clichés: how badly do scriptwriters do it when we place our stories in the villages? The mayor, who in addition to being cultured, is courteous, did not want to sink me and explained to me that in his town that of culture they have it by hand, because there they were born Jorge Manrique in 1440 and Pedro Berruguete in 1430. And he quoted me a fragment from the diaries of Ortega y Gasset, in which the great thinker is on a train on the way north and the convoy stops precisely in Paredes de Nava. Good old Ortega notes in his notebook: “these rooftops of churches and hospices, what hopeless sadness they give off & mldr; & rdquor ;. Take prejudice! Take cliche! And without getting off the train! The mayor was rightly indignant. It is not for less. From Virgilio’s ‘Bucólicas’ to Santiago Lorenzo’s ‘Los asquerosos’, We intellectuals have been happily giving opinions on the field for centuries.
So I proposed to him to call a meeting of scriptwriters who would live as a village for a couple of days, which is to get off the train and taste the terrain. It seemed very good to him. The only risk is that we get to stay, I warned him. Creators, after all, do not need more than space and time to create (and a wage, like everyone else). At the fair it was clear that some lack what others have left over. As soon as we organize ourselves, let’s not rule out that today’s Berruguetes and Manriques emerge, once again, from a town.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com